Insatiable Tome
Wondrous item, rare
This large, ragged tome weighs 12 pounds and has up to one thousand blank vellum pages inside it. The tome is magical and devours any smaller nonmagical book or document placed next to it with rows of hidden teeth over the course of 1 minute. After the tome has eaten a book, you can use an action to speak the tome's command word, followed by the name of a book or document it's eaten, to cause the previously destroyed contents to appear on the blank pages of the book. The contents are magically printed on the tome's pages in the same language or cipher they were originally written in and remain until you speak the tome’s command word again to erase them or replace them with another document's contents.
The tome dislikes the taste of magic. Any swallowed pages containing spells, magical sigils, or arcane scrolls are harmlessly spat back out by the tome. However, any notes, spells, or magical sigils that are written in the tome (instead of having been eaten by it) can be recalled if they're either dated, labeled, or titled. Written commentary, notes, and other such addenda to documents within the tome are saved by it and appear whenever the document is recalled again.
"They say it's like having a library with you all the time. An unkempt, terrifying, unholy library...but it still sounds like not an all-together terrible thing to keep around."
Comments (6)
Here's an unrelated question: upon commission could you design a psionic item (even if 5e psionics aren't out yet), and are you familiar with the esthetics and lore of the Dark Sun setting?
Heya! I'm not taking commissions right now. I'm also, admittedly, not familiar with Psionics or that setting: I stick to what's available in the DMG and SRD (Systems Reference Document), since that's what I can legally make content for.
Does it only contain a thousand pages worth of books? If there is no limit to it's holding, but you're its new proprietor, you won't be able to name a single document it contains. So no table of contents? Someone could write a table of contents and feed it to it, and others could add addenda to it across the years. You seem to suggest it can contain spells written into it, so it could be an infinite spellbook?
This is totally correct! You could also write a page, name it "Table of Contents", and then ask the book to recall that ToC for you whenever you need it!
So cool! It’s a library of holding, and such great flavour!
This is why we stack books horizontally instead of vertically 🙃 Awesome entry!